KTH professor Mathias Uhlén, founder of the Human Protein Atlas, was interviewed in GenomeWeb about the new Alpha Cell project, an effort with the aim to map and model cellular components and processes.

The recently launched AlphaCell project is a joint effort between SciLifeLab and KTH with $36.5 M in funding from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation that will combine existing data with AI analysis to generate three-dimensional models of cellular structures and track their behavior over time and in response to different perturbations. Or as Mathias Uhlén, one of the leaders of the project, says "What we want to do is try to harness the Al revolution to predict and explain living systems"

In this interview professor Uhlén shares his views on how to begin the journey to eventually reach this goal and mentions that the first phase will build on data already available in the Human Protein Atlas including more than 10 million manually annotated bioimages and single-cell gene expression profiles across 81 cell types from 31 human tissues.

As a first step this data can be used in annotation efforts to try to define the buildings blocks of human cells in terms of e.g. tissue-specific proteins, house-keeping proteins and the functional proteome, with the next step aiming to define the protein networks and interactions present in different cellular compartments and across different time points, he says.

Full article available from GenomeWeb